The Anonymous Widower

Codebreaker At The Science Museum

This morning, I went to see the exhibition about Alan Turing called Codebreaker at the Science Museum.

Posters for Codebreaker

it is actually only a small exhibition, but with good quality and some unusual exhibits, including a differential analyser built out of Meccano.

There was also some exhibits and documents on Turing’s personal life, including the Coroner’s report on his suicide.

The exhibition says that his mother thought his death may not have been suicide and in his Wikipedia entry, this is said.

Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Hodges and David Leavitt have suggested that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, both noting that (in Leavitt’s words) he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Queen immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”

If you look at others like Turing, such as Newton, you find characters very much on the edge. I used to work with a programmer, who always sang and made strange noises as he coded.  He argued that programming was such a logical business, you had to do something mad to balance the mind. Turing wasn’t a programmer in the sense we think now, but he was someone steeped in logic and I suspect the same applied to him.

Sadly, in today’s world, Turing would probably be treasured in much the way Stephen Hawking is.

At least now, hopefully his sexuality would not have been the problem it was in the 1960s.

June 22, 2012 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, News | History, Homosexuality, Museum, Science, Suicide